Prima facie evidence of the need to boycott Walmart (as if more were necessary). From ThinkProgress (hat tip Catherine C):

A Walmart in northeast Ohio is holding a holiday canned food drive — for its own underpaid employees. “Please Donate Food Items Here, so Associates in Need Can Enjoy Thanksgiving Dinner,” a sign reads in the employee lounge of a Canton-area Walmart…

The company has long been plagued by charges that it doesn’t pay its employees a real living wage. In fact, Walmart’s President and CEO, Bill Simon, recently estimated that the majority of its one million associates make less than $25,000 per year, just above the federal poverty line of $23,550 for a family of four…

Walmart’s low wages come at a public cost. Because low-income workers still need housing and health care, taxpayers end up doling out millions in benefits to bridge the gap faced by many of the store’s retail workers. They have also led to strikes at Walmart stores from Seattle to Chicago to Los Angeles in recent weeks.

So what’s next, a soup kitchen for Walmart staffers? That would be wonderfully efficient too. Get them in for some homeless-shelter quality Thanksgiving fare at 4:00 PM and they’ll be ready to open at 6:00 PM on Thanksgiving when Black Friday sales start. (If you’ve ever been involved in food prep and service at this sort of establishment, you’ll find it’s often not terribly tasty, on the probably correct assumption that hungry people won’t notice. In fairness, the cooks typically buy cheap ingredients to stretch limited budgets and many who are used to working with better materials don’t know how to compensate).

And this comes against a backdrop of more evidence of widespread distress. For instance, Real News Network reported earlier this week that Census data showed that the the number of poor people was 3 million higher than previously estimated.

The most striking element of this report are that Wicks-Lim of PERI points out that the new data increase the proportion of workers that are below the poverty line from 7% to 10%. She also argues that the official measure of poverty is far too desperate, and up to two times the official poverty line is a more realistic measure of “poor”. That means 34% of Americans, including pretty much all front line Walmart workers.

On the MSM news here this morning there was a feature on how supermarkets “mislead” customers with the promotion of multi-buys, roll-backs, and other “discounts” which are in fact nothing of the sort.

http://news.sky.com/story/1170484/supermarkets-taken-to-task-over-offers is the link, but frankly, that reporting shows everything that is wrong with how society treats business now-a-days. (note that “Asda” is Walmart’s flag of convenience brand here in the UK; they did start re-branding their stores Walmart for a while until the Walmart brand became hideously toxic, they retreated behind this long-standing “Asda” brand instead.)

Where does one start ? Well, firstly, the characterisation that these are “errors”. “Errors” involving pricing aren’t really errors. If a supermarket doesn’t take reasonable care (and repeated offences show that reasonable care isn’t taken) then that is FRAUD. If I commit a fraud, I’m looking at jail time, or at least a fine. These companies get told to do better next time.

Not in the link above, but on air, a Conservative politician was interviewed (not, regrettably in the video embedded in the article), courting a bit of popularity by “criticising” the big corporations involved. What she advised was closing the offending stores for a minute (yes, 60 seconds).

Okay, that’s some sanction, but what about the sanction that the law allows — PROSECUTION ? The reason the lady being interviewed gave for this light-touch sound flogging with a wet noodle was… to protect the employees from negative consequences if the corporations suffered as a result of fines or prosecutions. When did it become socially acceptable for a big corporation to be spared the consequences if its actions by threatening (or even, just having the power to threaten) to throw the workers under a bus and suffer layoffs or pay cuts (not that you can easily cut pay of workers on minimum wage…) because of corporate wrongdoing ?

Then we have a bit of blaming the victims “…In the meantime shoppers should look carefully at the special offers… Make sure that you are not getting misled into buying something that you think is a good deal when that is just not the case.” Excuse me ? Run that by me again… so I am responsible for policing the behaviour of a £100 Billion industry and making sure that I don’t get fleeced by it whilst buying my groceries ?

Scant consolation that workforce in these companies is exploited just as badly as the customers are. Would you be stunned to learn that Adsa/Walmart has got convictions for anti union practices (trying to bribe workers to leave their union) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4787946.stm ? I wonder why they’d try to do that…

A microcosm of everything that is wrong with business today. Why do we put up with it ? (ah ! that’s a more complex question.)

The Quebec scanner law goes one better than Michigan. If the item scans wrong (and it’s less than $10) you get it free! Absolutely f*ng amazing how fast grocery stores (Loblaws) managed to correct their pricing.

The first couple of weeks were great shopping. Got quite a few things for free… Now…not so much.

The “error” in these cases is not making a mistake; it’s being found out.

I was once told that in Germany it used to be the case that if a retailer advertised something as “buy one get one free” or similar, the customer could by law demand to have only the “free” one and leave the other. Does anyone know if this is or was correct? Whether or not it is, my brief visits to Germany suggest that deceitful pricing is much less prevalent than elsewhere.

What certainly is the case is that gross margins have inflated beyond belief here in Britain. Around 15 years ago the gross margin on a litre of milk was just 1 or 2 pence as one would expect of a commodity item. The last data I saw suggested it’s heading for half the retail price! Rent extraction or what?

The solution was worked out a century ago – the Robinson Patman Act which worked to create a level playing field by reducing economies of size (and bullying). One of Reagan’s first acts on becoming President was to direct the commerce Department not to enforce it.

One big problem here in the States that allows these dirtbags to get away with this stuff is the fact they know their employees have almost no social safety net. This kind of holiday collection is typical of Walmart: Manipulate the customers’ humane concern for employees, get THEM to buy food then turn around and donate them back to Walmart. Walmart gets to credit itself with the profit AND deduct it off their taxes as a donation rather than actually care about their staff. EVIL.

I must admit, I feel for many of the front-line managers at Wal-Mart, mostly because I’ve known several. Could you imagine dealing with real personnel concerns on what must be a shoestring budget? Having also to deal with the incredibly high rate of inventory shrinkage, which I know just a few years ago was the highest in the industry? And on top of that, not being very well compensated yourself.

Stuff like this creates a firestorm, yes. But I fear the corporate reaction to it may be to prohibit employees from assisting each other in this way. Really not a better situation.

Dear YF;
Even here in East-Bumblefck, (just down the road a piece from Dogpatch,) that figure is poverty. What keeps it from being true destitution, I’ve observed, are the donations and assistance of friends and relatives. Viable communities are the surest prescription for, viable communities. In my darker, more cynical moments, I can easily see the atomization of modern life as being a “cunning plan” set in motion by shadowy “Masters of the Worlds Fate.” My consolation, if it can be called that, is the realization that it’s all being run by Sir Baldrick!

By itself, it likely would. On the other hand putting money into peoples hands directly instead of relying on trickle down nonsense might just be a wash. Of course if no one produces then there will be nothing to inflate in the first place, but this assumes no one will work. I don’t buy that scenario. The vast majority will work if given the choice (even with a BIG), and thus produce sufficient goods and services. Even if there’s a JG, it doesn’t have to be mutually exclusie of a BIG. My larger point is that we don’t need the Walmarts of the world dictating economic outcomes for individuals, much of which comes at the expense of government transfer payments anyways for those unlucky enough to be wage slaving at said Walmarts of the world.

And while we’re at it let’s also remove the myth of so called free trade that Walmart and others hide behind as the basis of their business models. All trade is managed trade. Heck, virtually everything is managed in our hyper-complex country. Once that veil is removed, and all is exposed for what it is, it will be all the easier to persuade the masses that a well managed and just system promoting a viable living standard not tied to wage slavery is in all our best interests. Imagine the good that would flow from that realization, not to mention the melting away of social pathologies, which are suck a pox on our so called advanced civilization.

Economic theory — and we can debate how valid that is but let’s accept orthodoxy for the sake of simplicity — suggests that you don’t get inflation until productive capacity is exceeded by demand.

Most MMT commentators (me too !) believe that our current problems are lack of demand related. If the premise is that we have a consumer economy but consumers don’t have enough spending power in aggregate, and that premise is true, then you need to boost real incomes overall. A minimum income is a good way to do that.

Now, we could veer off here into a perfectly worthwhile debate about how healthy — or unhealthy — an economy so heavily dependent on consumption really is. Many think that we need to move away from a dependence — you might say “addiction” — on consumption as this is no way to carry on.

I won’t go there in this comment but it is worth thinking about. How to rebalance the economy away from (over- ?) consumption in to something more sustainable *without decimating the living standards of labor* is not going to be easy. It’s certainly completely impossible while the proposed solutions currently in play are either “let’s reboot mass consumption based on debt bubbles” (see yesterday’s piece on Krugman here at NC for more on that one) or “lets kick labor while it’s down” (see today’s piece on the joys of working for Wal-Mart for more on that one) !

Of course, how big the BIG is matters a lot. But there is no question that a big naked BIG – a big BIG without a JG that pays even more, will cause continual, high and accelerating inflation, probably hyperinflation. So it will really not be much of an income guarantee at all.

The plutocracy would and have vastly preferred a naked BIG to any sort of JG, because a JG works, and a naked BIG doesn’t and will soon be taken away. And is pretty clearly the idea of people who haven’t ever had much contact with poor and working people, who don’t have the luxury of magical thinking. A BIG without a JG is based on lies: That the ordinary person’s labor is worthless. That an ordinary person cannot decide by himself whether he needs or wants more money and should be prevented from realizing the very real personal and social asset of his labor to obtain it.

Wray has some pieces at economonitor on BIGs with some pointers to literature. Pavlina Tcherneva and Philip Harvey are the other experts on JG vs BIG. I gave a pretty exhaustive literature review in a comment to one of Wray’s economonitor pieces.

In my experience, groceries at Walmart are higher and of less quality than the local-regional area chain grocery stores.

And, no, there are no corner store alternatives to the local chains, but the local chain I shop at has had mostly the same cashiers and butchers working there for 10 or 15 yrs., so I suspect they are doing something right by their labor force.

COSTCO consistently gets much better marks than Walmart in how they treat and pay their employees. Wall Street has complained that COSTCO overpays it’s workers and that its stock would be priced higher if it cut their pay.

I’ve been in Walmarts maybe 3 times in the last 6 years (we were in rural areas and they were the only place within an hour drive with the stuff we needed). Most of the shoppers looked to be middle income. If people who weren’t poor abandoned them, they’d be in a world of hurt. Their margins are sufficiently thin that the loss of even 10% of their customers (which probably provides 15% of their sales) would be a killer.

ronbon, while I agree somewhat, I do have an issue: say I barely make enough money to provide the basics for my family, because I work at Wal-Mart; ergo it is important for me to make my dollars stretch as far as possible. Shopping at Wal-Mart (or similar stores) is the way to do that. If I spend 5% more on groceries at a local store, I have to spend 5% less on something else: rent, utilities, medicine/medical care, children’s activities, etc. How does your solution address this problem?

Hugely profitable corporations paying below-subsistence wages is a pattern we cannot afford to continue, boycotting particular corps will not solve this problem. Even if you put Wally World out of business (unlikely) there will be somebody else to take their place and continue their practices.

Well put Diptherio. There is always another smacker-me-with-spondoolies corporate crap-toad ready to inflict their own brand of poison upon the poor.

I’m just soooo relieved to see the upper-crass scraping by a bowl-a-poop for the piss-poor. It is no mean feat to resourcefully belch away any distasteful heartburn on the Walmart fortune. Indeed, even Hollywood excels at regurgitating fallacious Hunger Games doesn’t it?

I wonder if the Walmart family would be less likely to disgracefully stand behind this Thanksgiving Food Drive, if their friends had the unenviable chance of being on the other side of such wholesome mealy-mouthed welfare?

Still, is it any worse than the rest of us attending soirees in aid of the poor, only to babble in liquid treats & tidbit nuggets, deaf-earring a thoughtful host who strains to inform? Better yet, are we not impersonating the Walmart family when we egoistically pack up low-grade Es and déclassé diet dribble at the local foodbank in front of an insatiable camera lens? And are we so much better educated and well-informed than the poor, to attend gourmet talks sharing our feelings about food-educating the poor without actually inviting a poor community along to said event (and following it up with a fresh farm-to-table organic culinary feast for them afterwards…forgoing our own liquid treats and tidbit nuggets)?

At least our own standards of ego will have been augmented if nothing else, yeah? Polite society which excludes people treated as the most marginal from entering gentrified public spaces to instead teach us what really matters in poverty, is as rare as lego-little-people shit, isn’t it?

It is the Madonna-in-Africa over Sheryl Crow-in-America adoption. It is a George Clooney satellite over a Mark Wahlberg Youth Foundation. It is in so many ways, simply the ‘nomos’ of reality-life today without a magnanimous ‘oikos’ in our own backyards, and is predicated on the assumption that not only do the well-off know best, but that wealth trickles down eventually unless you’re a personal failure without enterprise, bus fare or comb.

It actually costs more in the long-run to manage poverty than to end it, but the patronizing patriarchs of Walmart may have cleverly circumvented this, so their employees will continue to wage a battle for survival from below the poverty line. It will be a cold-shoulder to merited shame if politicians do nothing to stop Walmart. And it will be the appalling interminable evaporation of what is left of fair or progressive steam in the engine of America.

No, the solution is to come up with a system that doesn’t reward psychopathy.

It’s been said that good men do good things and bad men do bad things, but to get good men to do bad things requires religion. I must disagree, I suspect that religion is actually better at getting bad men to do good things, I think that to get good men to do bad things requires capitalism, and the constant races to the bottom that it creates, so managers of competing stores are forced by the “logic” of the market to have to match WalMarts personnel practices.

I started reading “Econned” last night, and the quote by JFK about otherwise practical men relying on a defunct economist resonated very strongly with the idea that economics is treated as a religion by Serious people.

We should all support Walmart’s endeavor here and follow their lead. There are millions of hungry people in the U.S., many of them children; you probably know at least 2. Your mission then is to visit one and simply describe to them the suffering of the other. Most will naturally want to help. Remember you’re playing with people’s emotions at an especially vulnerable time: the holiday season in America, in all its voracious glory. Don’t expect much, these people all live at or near the poverty line. But you should be able to pry some canned goods out of them, maybe even a few bucks.

You really have to hand it to Walmart, putting their employees first and making it easy for them to share each other’s pain. Maybe someday they’ll be able to offer more than poverty wages….maybe when there’s more profit in owning a multi-national retail corporation. Until then it’s only right that employees help each other out.

I have to put a shout out to one of my local papers, The Cleveland Plain Dealer ( http://www.cleveland.com/business/index.ssf/2013/11/is_walmarts_request_of_associa.html ), for breaking this story. Their slant is different but it’s hardly a complimenatry article and the C.P.D. is not a left leaning indi publication. Also, the employee who took and sent out the photo is a brave “whistleblower”. If her working life wasn’t already hell, if Walmart management knows who did it, they will probably make it so now. Do they have ways of removing such people from their workforce, oh yes, and North East Ohio is hardly an area of job growth. The retailers aren’t even putting on seasonal help for the Holidays from what i can tell from surveying the local job openings. As for boycotting Walmart over wages and other business practices, aren’t they the largest employer in the U.S.? If they are convinced, one-way-or-another, to raise wages won’t they by virtue of their power make sure other low wage payers must must follow suit? And as to higher wages causing inflation, with American wages as depressed as they are, i don’t see it if the increase is happening on the poverty level of the pay scale. That money going to people who must and will spend it, i see it acting more as a goose to the economy. Haven’t a number of studies repeatedly shown just that? (By-the-way, does anyone know if walmart still indulges in the practice of buying “Dead Peasant Insurance”? Nice racket; malnurish work force and stress them out, watch as they grow sick and die and then turn a profit on their deaths.)

How about: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it without a sense of ironic futility.” Errol Morris

Thank you, Yves. Another reason why I refuse to shop at Walmart. But then, I am a privileged middle-class, educated (more or less), white woman. And, I can read your great blog every day, so I know what is really going on :-)

But, your comment on the quality of the food at soup kitchens has roused me to reply. I cook once a week at a Catholic Worker House. If you are not familiar with the Workers, they are a group of people who practice communal living and (usually) offer “hospitality” to people in the community who are currently unhoused. And more and more of the guests have jobs, but have ended up “on the street,” for various reasons.

Our local Worker house offers shelter to 8 to 12 (depending on the size of the current family group) people. When I started cooking there, I vowed to avoid the mushy macaroni and glutinous stews and canned fruit cocktail menus. I steamed organic broccoli to a crispy green olive-oil enrobed goodness and provided steaks for holiday dinners.

After a couple of weeks, one of the guests apologetically mentioned that she could not chew the crispy (or raw) veggies because of her dental problems. And she loved carrots! I realized (a shock to my privileged white middle class mind) that most of the guests had multiple missing teeth as well as a host of other dental problems. Not to mention countless other ailments, many of which could probably be linked to the dental problems.

So …. I am now cooking the veggies to a soft consistency, rescuing them from the heat just before they collapse into glue. And, making mashed potatoes, meatloaf, slow-cooked cheap cuts of meat that dissolve into the gravy, and soft pasta. And, frittatas loaded with soft veggies. I still provide the raw veggies and salads for those who are fortunate enough to have their teeth in good working order.

Poverty, homelessness, ill-health – both mental and physical, loss of teeth – all of these are linked together. It’s bad enough when I see them in older men and women. We all deteriorate as we age. But, it’s heart-breaking when I see them beginning in the the children at the House.

I’m glad you take such care, but I’ve worked in kitchens for the homeless where they used over-age veggies (and not “overaged but actually still pretty good” I mean old and sorta wilted) and saw nothing wrong in serving little candy treats that were stale (as in not far from being rancid) chocolate.

“For now I ask no more than the justice of eating.” – Pablo Neruda, Chilean Poet

A hungry man or woman or child just sees food.

“Hunger is isolating; it may not and cannot be experienced vicariously. He who never felt hunger can never know its real effects, both tangible and intangible. Hunger defies imagination; it even defies memory. Hunger is felt only in the present.” – Elie Wiesel

Headline should read Alice, Rob and Jim Walton -the USA’s wealthiest family and owners of Walmart demand charitable donations to feed and clothe their employees. The corporate brand name Walmart removes a certain personal culpability and distances these retched members of humanity from their destructive societal actions. It is they who’s destroying the prime-directive of the commonwealth, and that is to do no harm to the common good and fabric of society.

According to Forbes 400, the six wealthiest heirs to the Walmart empire combined worth is staggering $115 billion. This is the first time in American history that one family has controlled a 12-figure fortune.

“Separate an individual from society, and give him an island or a continent to possess, and he cannot acquire personal property. He cannot be rich. So inseparably are the means connected with the end, in all cases, that where the former do not exist the latter cannot be obtained. All accumulation, therefore, of personal property, beyond what a man’s own hands produce, is derived to him by living in society; and he owes on every principle of justice, of gratitude, and of civilization, a part of that accumulation back again to society from whence the whole came.” T. Paine

“All Ideological State Apparatuses, whatever they are, contribute to the same result: the reproduction of the relations of production, i.e. of capitalist relations of exploitation” Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”

I think Yves is a bit unfair to Scrooge. At least in the end he sent a Christmas turkey to Bob Cratchit and Tiny Tim, and in general became a decent human being. What Walmart is doing is asking the Bob Cratchits to buy turkeys for the other Bob Cratchits. Fair is fair but I think Yves owes Scrooge an apology. Today’s austerity peddlers will never experience a Scrooge-like transformation.

This is lot like the trick seen occasionally in supermarkets: “Buy a bag of grub for the flood victims … fire victims… etc, with packed bags allready to go” But the baggies always seemed to be rung up at retail.

Always the skeptic, I once asked the manager (not the cashier or bag boy!) if there were any discounts or if the baggies were somewhere close to wholesale price. No.. Sorry No!

They disappeared soon afterware, and never returned.

At least Walmart is consistent: consistently greedy, brutal and deceptive.

As far as “food” donations, we have bins at the exit of the local Stupormarket wherein people deposit “food” such as Choco Pops, Doritos, Pepsi, Hamburger Helper and other assorted industrial matter passing for “food”.
This “food” is then distributed to who knows since there is no audit trail. Quite possibly just put back in stock by the Stupormarket. Pump up the margin! (Notice how many chains have assorted boxes at the cash for charitable donations, sometimes to organizations run by them for their own use and profit. Just how are beneficiaries of these “charities” selected?)

In addition, at my Stupormarket, we have public begging by assorted sons and daughters of the gentry who apparently cannot afford the recreational activities of their offspring. So, these waifs must beg for donations by bagging “food” usually attired in their sportz uniforms. What to say about folks who allow their children to beg publicly?